Three Days of Weather

Late July, and the sky did three different things in three days, which up here counts as an event.

Day one was just heat. The kind that sits on the ridge and doesn’t move, haze thick enough that I couldn’t see past the second range of peaks by early afternoon. I logged visibility at four miles by two o’clock, which for this station is bad, not dangerous-bad, just useless-bad, the kind where you’re technically watching for smoke and can’t actually see anything past your own nose. I sat on the catwalk with a paperback and read the same page twice because the light was doing something to my eyes, a kind of shimmer off the tin roof.

Day two the haze broke and a front came in from the west, fast, the way they do when there’s nothing between here and the coast to slow them down. I watched it build for maybe forty minutes, a wall of grey stacking up over the far ridge, and then it seemed like another storm was coming in, the radio crackling and cutting in and out the way it does before lightning, and I could hear thunder in the distance a good while before I saw the first strike. When it hit the tower is exactly the wrong place to be and exactly where the job puts you, so I sat on the stool with the glass insulators under each leg like I’m supposed to and counted the gap between flash and sound until the gap stopped mattering because it was right on top of me. Rain came sideways for maybe twenty minutes. Then it just left, the way these ones do, moving on to bother somebody else’s ridge.

Day three was the one I keep thinking about. Everything washed, the air had that scrubbed quality it gets after a hard rain, and the light around seven that evening came in low and orange under a cloud deck that hadn’t fully cleared, so the whole basin lit up like something was burning even though nothing was. I’ve seen a lot of sunsets from this catwalk over five seasons and I don’t think I’ve seen that particular color more than three or four times. I didn’t have a camera worth anything and didn’t especially want one. I just stood there with a cup of coffee going cold and watched it for as long as it lasted, which wasn’t long, fifteen minutes maybe, and then it was ordinary blue dusk again and I went in and lit the lamp and wrote it down in the logbook next to the smoke sightings, because that’s where it goes, there’s no other place for it.

People ask what I do up here for five months and the honest answer most days is that I watch the weather happen to a piece of land I don’t own and can’t leave, and it’s rarely as good as those three days were. Most of the season is flatter than that, smoke checks and radio silence and reading in the good light by the window because the solar panel won’t run a lamp and anything else at the same time. But you get a stretch like that one every so often, three days that each did something different, and it’s enough to make the whole rest of the summer make sense.

I didn’t talk to another person during any of it except Hank, twice a day, same as always. He asked if I’d caught the storm on day two. I told him I’d counted the gap down to nothing. He said that sounded about right for this time of year and moved on to the next station’s check in, and that was the whole conversation, and it was enough.